


ASHES WE ARE AND FROM ASHES WE RISE

by AgnesClementine



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: ??? i think, Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, As Fuck, Bobby | Trevor Wilson-centric, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Happy Ending, I promise, Love Confessions, M/M, Polyamory, Self-Indulgent, Sunset Curve (Julie and The Phantoms), Supernatural Elements, author doesn't know wtf this is, but. they get better, necromancer bobby baby hell yeah, uh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 09:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30087147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgnesClementine/pseuds/AgnesClementine
Summary: Mom catches him after sundown, copper bowls laden with candles and fruit and herbs clutched to his chest and steers him back inside the house with a firm hand on his shoulder. She doesn’t yell and she doesn’t lecture and Bobby asks her, “How did you know?”“Because,” she tells him, putting away the bowls, “death is also lonely.” She turns to face him, draped into the sunset colors slipping in through the window, her eyes dark and strong, and says, “You need to learn to put things to rest.”*****************************AKA, Idk wtf this is. But. Happy bday to one (1) Bobby Wilson <3
Relationships: Bobby | Trevor Wilson/Alex Mercer/Luke Patterson/Reggie Peters
Comments: 30
Kudos: 49





	ASHES WE ARE AND FROM ASHES WE RISE

**Author's Note:**

> So. I have no idea what this fic is. But. I have been told it's good.
> 
> Let me know what you think and enjoy! :)

_ “A thousand dreams within me softly burn.” _

_ Arthur Rimbaud _

Bobby sometimes feels like a protagonist in some Southern gothic novel. The kind that came from a rich, old-money family, raised sheltered inside the lines of a property lined with a tall metallic fence, inside the mansion shrouded in mist, and got a serious reality-check once their bubble got popped. The difference between them and Bobby was that Bobby knew his family was downright fucked up way before his bubble burst like a blood-filled blister.

✻✻✻✻✻

“Death is greedy,” Bobby’s mom tells him, sitting cross-legged across from him on the floor in their basement. The candles flickering around them cast dark shadows around her eye-sockets and her fingers thread over non-existent rosemary cupped in the palm of her hand. The air smells thickly of incense and pomegranate peels, and the heat of the flames lures the blood into Bobby’s face. “It will take what you offer- and then everything else,” she says, setting vanilla sticks into a neat little circle between them. 

Bobby bunches the fabric of his pajama pants in his fists and nods blearily. Mom’s lessons come with the setting of the Sun, fighting with sleep for Bobby’s attention.

“You know our family has gifts,” she says next.

Bobby does know. The shadows that shift with the draft, echo-y, pale silhouettes clawing at the backs of their eyelids and dead relatives knocking at their windows.

“But this is something you are never going to use it for.”

Bobby blinks.

“What?”

His mom frowns. “Listen to me, Bobby. This,” she ghosts her hands over the spread of dried leaves and fruits in copper bowls between their knees, “is something you will never do. It doesn’t matter how much you want it, this is off-limits.”

“Why?”

Her features twist before smoothing out into something more motherly. She reaches out to cup his chin, hands covered in bone-dust and pine oil, grating against his skin.

“Because death is greedy,” she repeats. 

Bobby doesn’t get it.

✻✻✻✻✻

Carrie brings home a cat when they’re 13. It’s scraggly, black, trailing after his sister like a second shadow, and it dies the next winter. Dad buries it in a shoebox in the rose garden.

Carrie cries. A lot. 

Mom catches him after sundown, copper bowls laden with candles and fruit and herbs clutched to his chest and steers him back inside the house with a firm hand on his shoulder. She doesn’t yell and she doesn’t lecture and Bobby asks her, “How did you know?”

“Because,” she tells him, putting away the bowls, “death is also lonely.” She turns to face him, draped into the sunset colors slipping in through the window, her eyes dark and strong, and says, “You need to learn to put things to rest.”

✻✻✻✻✻

Mom gets sick. A lot of people get sick, but Mom spends nights and days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, eyes fixed on something they can’t see, whispering to herself as her body withers and eats at itself like a starving animal gnawing at its own limbs.

When she’s not doing that, she’s talking to Dad. Hushed, bedside conversations. Hushed, deathside conversations. It all blends and fuses together, hours of catching glimpses of them holding hands, foreheads touching and eyes closed as if in prayer, while life moves on outside, where there are not dying flowers in ceramic vases.

The nights get longer and darker and the shadows migrate to their parents’ bedroom, to Mom, gentle veils of black cashmere, blankets of black wool, cradling and protecting. Beckoning. 

Dad stands with them on the doorway more often instead of entering then, tucking them into his sides, warm and safe, just like he would when they’d go to the store and people would whisper about them. He’s not like Mom, or like him and Carrie; he doesn’t wake up mid-chant, tasting copper and dirt on his tongue, but he loves them all the same, if not even more than they could ever understand.

✻✻✻✻✻

Bobby doesn’t quite realize that Mom is dead until Dad is bolting down her grave in their backyard cemetery. 

“If we fall into temptation,” Mom said years before. 

✻✻✻✻✻

High school is different. It’s a phantom downpour, raindrops Bobby can’t keep track of that blur his vision while the rest of his senses go understimulated, the shadows around him unmoving and inanimate, skin hot and hands clammy with Californian heat and anxiety. He’s alone most times now, as is Carrie when he asks. They are getting older and they’re not giving anything back.

He goes to classes and doesn’t talk to people and counts his fries, the spare change in his pockets while Carrie counts her bracelets and the chains of her necklace and the worshipers of her make-beliefs across the cafeteria. Wilsons are a religion of their own.

He counts his fries and the spare change and then he counts lunch trays- one, two, three- and boys- one, two, three- and then, soon, he’s counting the chords.

Luke and Alex and Reggie worship something else entirely, devout believers of taut membranes and hair-thin lines of metallic garrotes that tremble beneath their fingers just like Bobby does beneath their gaze.

He’s getting older and he’s giving back, fingertips calloused, and he’s waking up mid-verse.

✻✻✻✻✻

People still whisper when Bobby goes places. Carrie has Mom’s presence, the fearless backbone of intent and pride, teeth that shine like stars when she smiles, and words that cut like razors when she’s provoked. Bobby is made of softer things. If Carrie is the bones, then Bobby is the marrow inside them, bleeding and soft; sugar stains on the straws of Alex’s milkshake; pencil smudges on the pages of Luke’s songbook; candy wrappers crammed inside the pockets of Reggie’s leather jacket. He’s made up of little things, like scratches on the woodboards in their basement.

✻✻✻✻✻

He’s falling down and he lurches up inside his bed, lungs fluttering against his ribs, sharp, stinging pulses traveling up his arm. Behind his eyelids, blue eyes and world dark and blurry before it all bursts into white like a camera flash going off and blinding him.

Breath in, breath out, then his phone ringing. 

“So, everything is fine,” Alex says, “but Luke broke his arm.”

“He did?”

“Uh, yeah. He fell out through Reggie’s bedroom window.”

Luke is fine. Bobby’s arm still hurts. Luke says it’s not bad and that he doesn’t need to go to the hospital for them. Bobby gets up anyway and counts the scuffed-up lines on his sneakers while Dad drives him.

Inside the hospital room, Reggie says, “Hey, at least, if one of us actually dies, you can bring us back.”

“I’m not allowed to do that,” Bobby deadpans because they think it’s all a joke, a big fairy tale people have dreamed up and talked into existence. Mr. Morrison has a bastard son in Kentucky and the Wilsons talk to the dead. It’s not true, of course, because the dead are rarely interested in speaking or listening. 

Luke, high on pain meds, laughs.

He never asks why the three of them were all at Reggie’s in the middle of the night.

✻✻✻✻✻

He wakes up gasping when Alex can’t breathe, head pounding when Reggie startles awake with shouting, Luke’s fingers numb from playing and gripping the pen. He wonders if they wake up when Carrie crawls into his bed, crying because Julie is crying or not able to sleep because Flynn is binging a new show. He doubts it.

✻✻✻✻✻

He doesn’t think he’s breathing when he wakes up. His chest burns, his whole body shaking, numb, hurting, burning. It cuts through him like a knife, slicing open his skin and muscles, hacking away at his bones, and ripping into his nerves. Through the high-pitched ringing in his ears, he faintly hears himself screaming, a plethora of names falling from his lips,  _ Luke Reggie Alex Dad Mom please _ , screaming himself hoarse into the pillow while Dad holds his shoulder and whispers nonsense and Carrie plasters herself against his back.

✻✻✻✻✻

He doesn’t attend the funerals but his feet carry him to their graves the next night, hooks of their names dug into him and pulling him in. As he steps through the gate, the vail settles over his shoulders like a second skin, damp and gritty, familiar through some far-away, generations-long link. He remembers Rose Molina’s funeral, the smell of flower arrangements, and thinks about that quote: “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” 

But Bobby is just a boy in love and grieving.

✻✻✻✻✻

When they were seven, Mom cut the pads of his and Carrie’s ring fingers and fed the teaspoons of crimson to the shadows skulking around their house. It’s for protection, she had said. Everything has a bit of stardust and soul in it, dead or alive, and it only takes a little bit of blood to spark it into movement, ignite it. It doesn’t matter if it’s got a body or not; everything that life touches lives by relation. 

Sometimes, Bobby wonders if Mom became one of those shadows, tracing her fingertips along the grooves of the wood paneling on the walls while they sleep, if she still kisses their foreheads goodnight and sits on the bed with her hand over Dad’s beating heart.

Over dinner, Carrie tells them she wants Mom back.

“I know, baby, me too,” Dad responds, the wedding ring shining under the light of the dining room chandelier like a band of pure, white light. “But she’s gone and we have to let her go.”

✻✻✻✻✻

Bobby was never good with letting go. He held on for as long and as hard as he could, palms blistered and bleeding. Pharaohs were buried with their earthly possessions to bring them into the afterlife with them and Bobby is the same, just in reverse. He sees things, and they touch him, and he wants to keep them with him for as long as he lives. 

In the family graveyard, Bobby swears that the locks on Mom’s grave rattle as he loads her old car with bowls and jars from the basement. In the public cemetery, the fog coats his throat and fills up his lungs as thick as syrup. The pebbles grind beneath his bare feet, cold and wet and digging in sharply, trying to slow him down and swallow him up. Behind the tombstones, there are shadows reaching out for him like tendrils of black with moonlight smiles.

He settles somewhere in the middle between their graves, split between mind, heart, and soul, and drops to his knees.

His whole life is a shade that a tombstone casts on the grass, but as he lights up his candles and begins to chant, it feels as if he’s finally crawling out of the shade and into the path of pure, direct sunshine. The incense and vanilla sticks burn and fill the air, mixing with the aroma of dried pomegranate peel Bobby weaves above the open flame. The smell wraps itself around him like the chords of a song; golden chains and guitar strings. The words lose their shape on his tongue, his voice turning into a low hum, reverberating underneath his breastbone and making his heart shudder and beat harder.

He thinks of Alex and his fierce loyalty, and Reggie and his blinding kindness, and Luke and his heart-stopping ambition, thinks how the warmth of them might turn him into the Sun itself; a Sun that burns with a melody that thrums and echoes in the atria and ventricles of his heart, pulsing through the rest of his body until his fingertips burn with it, the affection strong enough to scorch through the veil and bring them back.

Death is greedy and death is lonely- and Bobby is both.

Pomegranate peel bursts into flames, stinging his fingertips, and in the dark, someone calls his name.

✻✻✻✻✻

Bobby spots them before they spot him. The three of them stumble out of the dark into the light of a streetlamp at the graveyard's main pathway, funeral suits stiff, but their skin flushed with life and eyes sparkling. Around them, the tombstones stand still, unmoving and just as devoid of life as they always were, while Bobby's life walks in three parts past them.

He rises to his bare, hurting feet at the sight of them, his heartbeat loud in his ears and strong against his ribs. The shadows cling to him, pull him back, but the grass wet with midnight dew is cold underneath his feet and he starts walking without conscious thought, muscle memory, and need prompting him to move. If he doesn't, he thinks he would die.

Alex is the one who sees him first, freezes in place as his eyebrows furrow while he takes in the sight of him. Then he says, "Bobby," just loud enough to carry through the space between them- but Luke is the one who reaches for him.

He crosses the steps separating them and yanks Bobby into his chest, solid and warm. His fingers dig into Bobby's nape and his spine like he's trying to wedge them between Bobby's vertebrae and when Bobby's legs go numb at the knees and he inhales sharply, Luke smells like wax and funeral home and the shampoo he usually uses.

"What- why- why are you here?" Alex asks, closer than he was moments ago. "Bobby?"

Reggie doesn't say anything, but Bobby feels his hand slipping around Bobby's biceps, his other one wrapping around his waist when he crowds in close to join the hug. 

"Bobby," Alex says again, his hand on Bobby's neck, fingers tangling with Luke's. "We died," he says, his free hand reaching around Luke to grasp at Bobby's. "We were dead. How- Bobby, how are we here?" He asks with urgency.

Reggie presses his forehead to Bobby's temple.

Bobby is cold and dizzy and feels like a sweater with a loose thread someone keeps pulling at, slowly unraveling him the longer they stay here, so he doesn't answer and just shakes his head.

Luke's fingers press in harder, almost to the point of hurting, and he asks, dreading, "Bobby, what did you do?"

✻✻✻✻✻

Reggie is driving. There is graveyard dirt underneath Bobby's fingernails and at the bottoms of his feet, leaving tracks on the footwell of the car. Bobby is tired.

His bones feel both hollow and filled with lead, its weight bringing him down and pushing him into the seat. There's something in the bottom of his stomach, a sort of emptiness that grows and slithers its way up his abdominal cavity. He wants to close his eyes, but in the end, he's just another one of God's terrified creatures and he keeps looking at Reggie's profile, the worried slope of his eyebrows pinched together as he keeps his eyes on the road, hands steady on the steering wheel. They're going home. The word feels like it fits for the first time since the night when Bobby woke up screaming like his soul was being torn into pieces.

" _ Home _ ," he tests it out, shaping his mouth and tongue around the letters soundlessly, his head rolling against the headrest.

In the backseat, Alex and Luke are silent, but they meet his eyes in the rearview mirror.

✻✻✻✻✻

The lights are not on when they arrive, but Dad is standing on the porch, arms crossed and an indescribable expression on his face. He has never looked more like Mom.

Behind him, Carrie hovers, peering at him through a curtain of honey-colored hair, and frowns at him before tugging Alex, Luke, and Reggie inside the house by the sleeves of their grimy suits.

They go, reluctantly, as if Bobby is the one who might vanish into the thin air as soon as they look away.

He won't, not now, and neither will they, but loving something is in part made out of little irrational fears strung together.

On the steps, Dad grips his chin in his hand as Mom used to, fingers shaking as they dig into his jaw, and asks him, "What the hell did you do?"

_ Loving something is in part made out of fears strung together. _

Bobby's expression twists just like the band around his lungs before snapping, stinging, and leaving fire in its wake.

"I didn't want to be alone," he says.

✻✻✻✻✻

That night, a night mare sits on his chest. Her fingers are cold when they card through his hair, voice like the finest silk when she whispers in his ear; words he doesn't remember because he wakes up with a jolt.

✻✻✻✻✻

In the morning, Alex asks, "Do we- are we supposed to tell our parents?" 

"What would we tell them?" Luke asks in response. He's eyeing his cereal in distrust, even though it's just Fruit Loops. Dad started buying it when Bobby started waking up with cravings, although he rarely actually ate it.

At last, Luke shrugs and scoops a spoonful in his mouth. He looks exhausted. Everyone does.

Leaning against the counter, Dad scrubs a hand over his face.

"Maybe, eventually,” he says. “But before things calm down, let's keep this between us.”

It's early, but Bobby is sure that the groundskeeper noticed the dug graves and opened, empty caskets. People will start talking and Bobby knows who they'll be talking about.

✻✻✻✻✻

There’s a line running vertically between his dad’s eyebrows. Bobby watches it get deeper and deeper as they clean the dishes after lunch, Dad wiping them and Bobby elbows deep in the sink, and finds himself saying, “I’m sorry.”

Dad looks at him, startled. “What?” He asks.

For a second, Bobby’s not entirely sure what he’s apologizing for. Then beneath the white suds, his hand closes around a knife and as he runs the tip of his thumb over the sharp edge, the pressing guilt that grows inside him like mold suddenly makes sense.

“For Mom,” he says. “Because I didn’t-”

And Dad is lightning quick. The cutlery he held in his hands clatters to the countertop and his palm, damp and warm, closes around Bobby’s chin. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” he tells Bobby. “Don’t you dare feel guilty about that even for a second.”

His fingers tighten, pressing against Bobby’s skin for a second to emphasize his words, but there’s no aggression in it. Mom was the protector and Dad was the caregiver. This is to soothe and to drive the point home, make it stick, not to scold or chastise.

“Your mom would never forgive herself for that.”

“You think it was a mistake,” Bobby states, matter-of-fact. The house is quiet, but Alex, Luke, and Reggie are somewhere around, alive. For that, Bobby  _ can’t _ feel guilty, and it makes him wonder if that means he’s a bad person because he’s greedy and so in love it should be terrifying. 

His dad doesn’t respond, runs his eyes over Bobby’s face. “Maybe,” he says at last.

“But?”

“If your mom was the one to outlive me, she would’ve done the same.”

✻✻✻✻✻

He’s sitting on the bottom step of the backyard porch, looking out at the sloping hillside of the family cemetery and twining oxidized brass wires in his hands when he hears footsteps approaching him from behind.

Ahead, the raised graves and headstones cast shadows over the grass, reaching for the house and Bobby, all cloaked in the golden, afternoon sunlight.

“You’ve been avoiding us,” Luke says it as half-statement and half-accusation. 

The wires in his hands are warm with his body heat and the green-blue flakes stick to his fingers. He doesn’t say anything, not yet.

There’s not much he can say without saying too much.

Reggie lets out a sigh and sits down on one side of him, Luke follows on the other and Alex hesitates just for a second before Bobby feels his knees pressing into the backs of his shoulders when he sits behind him. The free strands of wires tangle and he looks down to straighten them out again, keeps his eyes down as his fingers turn and press the thin metal, braid it into a plait.

“What’s that for?” Reggie asks, nudging him with his shoulder.

“To help me sleep,” he says and Alex’s knees jab into his shoulders as he leans forward to see what he’s doing. He lets out a breathy chuckle.

“So this is actually a thing,” he says. He doesn’t sound upset.

“Someone talked to you?” Bobby asks them- because he didn’t tell them, even though they could’ve come to their own conclusions with everything that’s been told about his family and with what has happened.

“I asked Carrie,” Alex responds.

Bobby nods, glad because he wasn’t looking forward to being the one to do it. He’s so tired of it all.

They sit on the steps in silence for a moment, letting the light seep into their pores. Bobby closes his eyes, head tipped back to the sky and his vision going black-red-pink-white with sunlight pushing past his eyelids. His fingers move automatically, like plucking the cords of his guitar, and, briefly, with Alex, Luke, and Reggie breathing beside him, he feels like he’s a body made out of nothing but light. Like he wasn’t born into shadows, his skin soft and fingers stained with cinnamon and charcoal.

After, when it seems like they’ve all huddled closer, pulled into each other’s atmosphere with their knees and thighs and shoulders touching, Luke asks, “Do you need this to help you sleep because of us?” He touches the shiny plait of braided threads whose end is dragging on the ground while Bobby braids the other side of it.

Bobby pauses then. He isn’t sure how he can answer that without causing damage and his pause makes Luke’s expression pinch as if he’s been shot.

“Bobby,” he says, pained, as Reggie’s hand closes around his arm, fingers tucked into the crook of Bobby’s elbow, and Alex shifts behind him.

“It’s fine,” he says, desperate to make them believe it. 

“You can’t sleep,” Alex says in response. “Is it- like, at all?”

“No, I just have- I just have dreams sometimes,” he explains and doesn't say nightmares instead. “But it’s fine, it’s nothing.”

The Sun starts setting slowly and the shadows get longer.

✻✻✻✻✻

Bobby feels it like a  déjà vu ; every night when he kneels in front of his bed with his hands clasped and fingers curled around the windowsill, it’s like the very first night his mom taught him to do it, his head bowed and his mouth shaping the soundless words of the chant that tastes like copper pennies and cocoa.

He’s barely a quarter into it when his door creaks open.

“Bo- oh,” Reggie’s words come to a sudden halt- just like his, Luke’s, and Alex’s footsteps at the doorway when Bobby looks at them over his shoulder, and just like Bobby’s own words. He’s lost his count, but it’s fine.

His bandmates seem embarrassed to have interrupted him, so Bobby beckons them over with “Come in.”

Alex closes the door behind them and asks, “Are you...praying?”

Bobby frowns and slackens his grip on the windowsill. “Yes and no,” he says. “Mom taught me.”

Just as luck doesn’t serve everyone in life, so it doesn’t in death either and, sometimes, the dead lose their way to the light. They venture off their path and end up stuck in this sliver in the doorway, the crack in the reality where there are hooks like fleshy valves in the heart, not allowing them to return. And they are lonely and miserable and so Bobby talks to them, humming a low chant just like Carrie does and just like Mom and everyone before her did. He doesn’t know if they hear him, but after Mom died, Dad took to it as well, so Bobby gets on his knees and hangs his head, and searches for his mother’s warmth in the dark, hoping to hear her voice join his.

“Do you want us to leave?” Alex asks him.

“No,” Bobby responds without a pause but bites down on  _ please, don’t ever leave. _ “I don’t mind.”

“Okay,” Alex says, and Luke adds, “We’ll be quiet.”

Bobby has never done this in front of someone else besides Mom, but when he turns back to the window, night air nipping at his hands and Moon bursting with light, it’s easy to slip into the hymn with his eyes closed and forehead resting on his forearms.

Nighttime is when the lines get blurred and Bobby is not just Bobby; not a person as much as little pieces of shadows and night sky carved into a human shape with an obsidian blade, pushed into skin and bones. It was reassuring in a way, he thinks, to know he’s tethered to something bigger than him, to the universe infinite and so vast that people still don’t know where it ends. And then he met the boys and all of his anchors and tethers got tangled up and rearranged, tying into knots with their own. It was messy and uncertain; so many ropes to wrap around his throat like umbilical cords of newborn love, to both give him life and have the ability to end it. 

Bobby has been intimately familiar with death his whole life, and it made it easy to tell it apart from life; to tell apart people who are simply going through the motions of life from those who are actually _ living _ \- but he never felt as acutely alive as when he was with Alex, Luke, and Reggie.

He’s still on his knees when something thuds against the floorboards next to him, warmth and shapes of bodies pressing against his sides, and hands, warm and calloused, covering his own. 

Reggie is the one who starts humming, then Alex and Luke join in, and Bobby swears he feels himself ripping at the seams. They don’t know what they’re doing; they don’t know what Bobby is doing, not really,  _ they don’t understand _ \- but they are reaching out even though they probably know their hands will close around empty air in the dark. It’s like he’s back at the graveyard, chanting into the earth and at the universe to give them back to him, and exposed to the light- true, pure light- for the first time in his life.

He doesn’t notice his eyes are wet until he’s done with the chant, all four of them curled in front of the window and the moon as if they were in front of an altar. His throat clicks when he swallows and he can’t tell whose voice it is that asks, “Bobby, why did you do it?”

There are dogs inside the house, Mom used to say. Whenever someone got born in the family, a new set of clawed footsteps could be heard echoing throughout the hallways; when Bobby and Carrie got born, and before, when Dad married Mom, gave his heart to be cradled by someone who only knew how to emboss tombstones and burn incense. There’s one of those dogs inside his chest now, a cub gnawing at his insides to be let out and Bobby feels the words welling up in his throat, pushing and pressing, sliding over the soft tissue inside his mouth and across his tongue like he would die if he didn’t let them out.

But they are at an altar and it’s the time for confessions, so he says, “Because I love you.” 

Because he doesn’t know how to let things go, and he’s greedy and desperate and alive. Because he’s human and humans crave all these types of affection and love, they hoard it and keep it tucked away at their fingertips, behind their eyes, or pumping through their bloodstream, and Bobby didn’t feel like himself without them by his side.

“We love you too,” Reggie says.

“No, I mean, I  _ love _ you,” Bobby says more forcefully.

“We heard you the first time,” Luke responds.

Bobby still hasn’t looked up, but he opens his eyes to the lines running through his floorboards, disappearing beneath his knees.

“Actually,” Alex says, voice tilting just the tiniest bit, “I’m pretty confident in saying that we’re in love with you.”

Bobby can’t tell if he starts laughing or crying but eventually, they crawl away from the window and there is simultaneously not enough and too much space between them. When Alex kisses him, it’s sure and firm and their hair falls in their eyes. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that Alex is more like marble than clay; he won’t bend however you want him to unless he doesn’t want it as well. Luke is not as steady and Bobby’s head presses into the side of his mattress when Luke kisses him, ambitious and full of fire, and Reggie’s kisses are as playful and sweet as he is, their fingers tangled on the floor. 

They crawl onto the bed in a pile of limbs, warm and happy and alive. And, somehow, the room doesn’t seem so dark anymore.


End file.
